Godwin's Law
“Godwin's Law is precisely like Hitler. The similarities between Godwin's law and the Nazis are uncanny. People who start screaming that the fascist law of Godwin has been invoked are no better then the guards at the Nazi death camps.”
Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Apparition) is a scientific law. It is not a theory! It is often mistaken for Goddard's law but has fewer penguins.
Godwin's law states:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of Nazis or Hitler spontaneously materializing and enacting systematic genocide against the poster approaches one.
Godwin's Law does not question whether the genocide enacted by Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate or justified, but only asserts that the enactment of one is increasingly probable.
The most frequent invocation of the law today is found on Wikipedia, where discussion threads for the most trivial of topics cover pages and pages. This explains the origin of the WikiNazis who roam the site, permitting only their warped "NOPV" version of the facts.
Second World War[edit]
It is a little known fact that the sudden and shocking rise of Nazism in Europe, ultimately culminating in the Second World War, was almost entirely due to the unintended invocation Godwin's Law. With the invention of the internet by Al Gore in 1918, the popularity of online discussions as a new communications medium had skyrocketed. All the social classes (save the poor, who could not afford computers -- or socks) now had a place to forge false, overblown but equally obnoxious identies; yell at peers and make new enemies; and complain about the day-to-day hardships of their respective lifestyles.
However, the internet was still a poorly understood phenomenon. Often the question would be posed "What is the internet? A big truck? Or a series of tubes?", proving just how dumb those backward folk really were.
Unfortunately, the greatest users of online discussion forums came to be Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled. Threads ran for weeks without mod supervision, then lay dorment for further weeks until being pointlessly bumped and subsequently trollied. The probability for spontaneous Nazi apparition rose to a ludicrous 230%, and before you could post "Oy vey" Europe was gripped by the icy claw of Hitler - both metaphorically and, some might say, literally. BREAKING NEWS Scientists say;- Gandhi is the Anti-Hitler and if the two ever met it may cause an explosion so large it would destroy the world.
The Man Behind the Law[edit]
Godwin's Law was created, startling enough, by a man named Mike Godwin. Godwin, having studied law at the University of Texas Try 'Em and Fry 'Em Department, has been involved in many First Amendment cases, all of this being a front for his true career: Nazi hunting. Godwin's knowledge that internet discourse causes Nazism makes it obvious that he wants free speech to continue so he still has a job (formulating scientific laws may be great for society but it doesn't pay the electric bill - well, except in Ben Franklin's case). He moved to The Free Kingdom of Wikimedia after suffering from a bout of severe depression when nobody would edit his Uncyclopedia articles.
The "Weak" Godwin's Law[edit]
Some decidedly non-scientific organisations, as well as fringe scientists, have endorsed an entirely new form of Godwin's Law. This states:
As a discussion on an online Neo-Nazi forum grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Jews approaches one.
However, this generally regarded by the mainstream scientific community as pseudoscience. Those who adhere to this version postulate that, among newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums, once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress. This principle has come under criticism for being inherently flawed in that it severely limits the use of such professional debate strategies as Reductio ad Hitlerum.